Terry Marotta: Both sides up

I was just walking by when I heard the following exchange between four First Graders and the 15-year-old placed in charge of them during their AC-and-bathroom break at the Y.

Terry Marotta

I was just walking by when I heard the following exchange between four First Graders and the 15-year-old placed in charge of them during their AC-and-bathroom break at the Y.

They were here for Summer Day Camp.

I was here for the ritual punishment of the Special Double Combo Kickbox and Bosu Class, “Bosu” being that new-fangled exercise device whose heavy circular base supports a rubbery hemisphere.

The word stands for “Both Sides Up” which means you can either use it bubble-side up to hop on-and-off, on-and-off, or bubble-side down, to balance on its flat circular platform while the whole things wobbles like a dying planet and, often enough, lands you splat on the hard gym floor.

But to get back to the little boys here:

One, with a round and earnest face, was trying his darnedest to tell the young staff member about the drama that had recently unfolded at his house.

“Guess what, guess what, our lights went out last night!” he exclaimed, not pausing for breath.

“Line up against the wall and sit,“ the youth said in the voice of the world’s most bored person.

Now I had really come to the Y that day for Pilates, but the class was full. That’s why I had migrated over to the Kickboxing and Bosu class where I lasted for 25 whole minutes before I began seeing stars.

It was barely half the workout but I was giddy with the effects of it and maybe that’s what made me stop and look at the little group all smiling happily as each one slid down the wall to assume a knees-up seated position.

The little round-faced boy tried again to get the staff member’s attention.

“It was completely dark!“ he cried.

“No poking,” was all the youth said, looking over the children’s heads, eyes glazed over and mouth open.

So…

I spoke up.

How dark WAS it?”

“It was SO dark!“ the boy enthused. “And my mother had to get flashlights!”

And you all told ghost stories?”

“Yes! Well actually, no. But nothing in the house worked! And it was AWESOME!”

“Guess what, guess what?” another child suddenly said. “One time my mom burned the dinner! And the flames were HUGE!”

“Oh! Oh!” said a third. “MY mom set off the smoke detective!” (It was all I could do not to smile at that one.)

And then the fourth child weighed in, actually raising his hand to tell of the time his baby brother flushed his grandmother’s glasses down the toilet.

I realize it was easy for me to be all twinkly and engaging with the four. After all I wasn’t the one who’d been out on a sweltering playground for the last two hours. Plus I had that fresh supply of oxygen zinging around in my blood.

But still. Little kids are little kids, exercise devices in their own right whose both sides are pretty much always up. It just seems to me that when they speak with such animation the least we big people can do is muster up a little joy when we respond to them.

Write Terry at terrymarotta@verizon.net or c/o Ravenscroft Press, PO Box 270, Winchester, MA 01890. Search on the web for her blog “Exit Only” to find more stories, and pictures too.